Advertising, the practice of promoting a product or service to a particular audience or to the public at large, has changed significantly over the years. Initially, advertising consisted of little more than simple posters or crude messages scrawled on public posting walls. As technology has evolved, however, so too has advertising. The advent of radio and television has allowed advertisers to develop creative messages comprising sound, video, and rich media that can be delivered to consumers as they sit in the privacy of their own homes. The emergence of the Internet has enabled the delivery of interactive advertising that can be presented on multiple platforms and the response to which can be immediately and definitively determined. Perhaps more significantly, the diversification of advertising into private spaces and multiple mediums of communication has allowed advertisers to craft messages that are tailored to a particular medium and audience.
This has also presented advertisers with the task of determining how advertising money and resources should be allocated. Companies often prefer to place advertisements for the same product, service, or brand across multiple mediums of communication (i.e., channels). Because different media outlets have different effectiveness in delivering different types of messages, an advertisement for the same product may generate a bigger response in one channel than another. The effectiveness of an advertisement may further depend on additional factors such as the time of day during which it appeared, the day of the week on which it appeared, and even the weather. Given limited resources and budgets, advertisers must make intelligent decisions about which forms of advertising to focus on and how the advertisements should be placed.
Thus, what is needed is a technique for identifying the various advertisements encountered by potential consumers and assigning credit for a purchase in a manner that accounts for each advertisement's influence on the consumer's purchasing decision. As will be shown, the embodiments disclosed herein provide such a technique in an elegant manner.